I love lines, which come into existence mainly under a human hand.  I love making lines, dragging ink, or graphite, or a color, over a surface.  I love refining them (though I almost never erase them).   Making lines on a page is one of the great pleasures of my life, and one of the great exercises in freedom.   Often it doesn’t matter what those lines form themselves into– words, symbols, images– the tactile pleasure of making the lines remains.

You can see tiny kids scribbling, making lines is clearly a pleasure one can appreciate early on.  As the fine motor skills improve, the enjoyment of making purposeful lines grows too, but there is enjoyment to be had even scrawling, the pen gripped in a hand that is like a foot.

Since we live in a highly specialized world of false dichotomies, where everything is set against something else, we often hear visual artists divided into draftsmen (their craft being line) and colorists (their realm being the juxtaposition and combination of colors.)   Line or Color, take your pick.  

If I had to pick one, and fortunately I don’t, it would be line.  I love color, to be sure: it’s an incomparable pleasure to pour a beautifully colored ink on to a white page, watch it shine like a wet floor then dry into a luminous panel of pure color.  Or to blend them, or mix two or more colors to alchemize them into a new one.  I’d be hard pressed to pick my favorite color.  I love a golden yellow, a little more orange than a sunflower’s petals, but I also love the blue gradient of the sky toward sundown.  I love scarlet, mustard color, many browns, the green of a tender sprout, hippie purple, grey.  Shoot, I love ’em all.  There are very few colors that leave me indifferent.

But with line, and enough determination to learn how to wield it, you can create many gradations between black and white.  These blocks of gradated darker and lighter blacks form a kind of color too, though without chroma.   You can make lines with color, of course, but a colorist isn’t primarily interested in that.

It is like this in many things humans do.  In music there is rhythm and melody, sometimes held to be distinct in the manner of line and color.  I find that line and color work best together, enhance each other ridiculously.  Same with rhythm and melody.  You can play in tune, play all the right notes, but it isn’t music unless it they are sounded and held against the rhythm.  In that regard, like the false choice between line and color, I’d have to pick rhythm if I could only have one.  A song without melody is not much of a song, but a song without rhythm, what the hell is that?

I close this little shot-in-the-dark with an observation about writing and another false dichotomy: love of language or love of story.  In the previous post I briefly compared books by William Kennedy, a former prize-winning journalist turned prize-wining novelist, and Stephen King, fantastically imaginative writer of numerous books that have been made into justly famous movies as varied as Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.  Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Fred Gwynne, Nathan Lane and Tom Waits, for the record.

I described Kennedy as being in love with language, and spreading its colors lushly on the page, and King as more plain-spoken and focused on the story, more of a draftsman laying down the essentials with a sharp, bold line.  Both writers are in love with language (who wouldn’t be in love with this miracle?) and both are intent on telling their stories.  Kennedy is more flamboyantly in love with words, King more low-key about it.  My favorite writer, Isaac Babel (as artfully translated by Walter Morrison) was madly in love with language and an inspired teller of highly condensed tales.  He tells unforgettable stories and doesn’t waste a perfectly-chosen word while painting scenes and drawing characters.  There is a line we dance on as we proceed, considering which darlings to murder and how, composed of all the colors of the rainbow.